Trapped with Geniuses

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Adaptation.

Your weakness?

Adaptation.

I guess that pretty much sums up my life.

The more I adapted, the further I sometimes moved away from myself and my dreams. And yet, because I kept adapting, I somehow always managed to stay on my feet and keep chasing those same dreams.

Looking back, there have been plenty of moments when I thought, I wish I had seen this coming.

Having a mentor matters.

Then again, whenever someone tried to suggested me a direction, I usually rebelled against that too. I don’t regret it. At least I learned to take responsibility for my own choices, while also enjoying the luxury of living more or less however I felt like.

While continuing to wait for Godot, there is a kind of freedom in absurd rebellion, much like Camus declaring Sisyphus free. Once you accept your fate and choose to push the rock yourself, perhaps you are free after all.

Whenever I don’t feel free, Sartre comes to mind. Either you create yourself and act accordingly, or you sabotage yourself and say, It had to be this way.

Project management was full of exactly these contradictions for me.

A career I never intended to start, some adaptation along the way, and eventually the effort to somehow remain myself. So far, the greatest reward has probably been the feeling of freedom.

I have never really managed to put myself in the “right” position in life. Then again, what exactly is right is debatable. When I look back at my professional life, it is much the same. And strangely enough, I quite enjoy the absurdity of the whole scenario.

After spending all these years trying to understand a little bit of everything, I still can’t confidently answer whether I have any real expertise. But when I think about it carefully, perhaps my greatest area of expertise is this:

How not to do something.

Every company I joined and almost every team I worked with was either going through a difficult period or trying to build something new. so do my unıversities.

Some were small companies. Others were large international corporations. I was lucky enough to join most of them not while they were dying, but while they were trying to be reborn. That meant I got to see bad and good practices and their consequences, but also what it looks like when people try to build a new system and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

My role was usually to turn chaos into order, or at least turn something bad into something slightly better. For years, I assumed I had simply passed through these places. Much later, I learned that I had apparently left a mark on many of them.

And that actually bothered me.

What exactly did I do that made them remember me?

So I started keeping what were essentially professional diaries. In project management language: lessons learned. Fortunately, failure stories are nothing like success stories. They are full of lessons.

And I have personally tried and failed at quite a few things.

For example, when I was a fresh project manager and realized people weren’t really taking me seriously, I once told everyone during a meeting:

We are not saving the world. If everyone simply did their job properly, there wouldn’t even be a need for what I do. My job is fundamentally ridiculous. Believe me, I don’t enjoy meeting every day and staring at your faces either. So either we focus on the work and solve the problems, or I will make your lives miserable with even more meetings.

After that day, everyone suddenly became much more cooperative. Things moved faster. Performance improved. My attempts to shorten meetings and reduce documentation as much as possible finally started paying off. The fact that I managed to say all of this in German also gave me the satisfying feeling of, Okay. That’s it. I’ve learned the language.

Of course, no good performance goes unpunished.

It usually just brings more work and more responsibility. And that is exactly what happened. Apart from project management, I ended up involved in almost everything related to management. I thought it was a three-person job. My boss and I eventually agreed it was a two-and-a-half-person job. I gave up playing Don Quixote, and eventually we became a two-person team.

While passing on my experience to the new colleague, I started using suspiciously populist sentences beginning with:

“Look, nobody will tell you this, but…”

Still, he told me I had given him some genuinely useful life lessons.

As usual, good performance created another problem. Our workload increased. At the same time, instability in the economy started hitting the company as well. And I found myself thinking:

Why exactly am I paying the price for Russia’s and Israel’s arrogance, or for whatever other fanatics who apparently don’t enjoy life decide to do?

Stress increased. Anger increased. The workload increased again. There were plenty of I told you so moments, but telling people above you that you told them so rarely means anything.

Sorry.

There were no ranks. We had a “flat hierarchy.” Basically, I was like the United Nations. Lots of talking, very little enforcement power.

Eventually, work itself started resembling the Cold War. The fact that all of this was happening in East Germany while my boss was an American citizen only increased the absurdity coefficient. Still, it was good experience.

The next level would probably be convincing Trump, Erdoğan and Putin to campaign for LGBTQ+ rights while simultaneously turning all three into climate activists.

I am generally a fairly disorganized person, although I enjoy organizing things obsessively. So an experience filled with this much chaos naturally produced a mountain of notes, complaints, scraps of paper and drawings added to meeting minutes. Apparently, though, I wasn’t the only one documenting things. While I was muttering things like:

“Which stupid meeting do we have now?”

“Why is opening your mouth so difficult?”

“We’re staging a terrible theatre play here.”

or

“See you in another one of the boss’s fantasies,”

the other project manager sharing the office with me was apparently writing down the things I said. Good student.

Weeks and months passed. Then the boss came up with another brilliant plan and made the team pay the price for the company’s negative balance sheet. Naturally, the problem was not the people responsible for bringing in projects or managing the business. The problem was the people actually doing the work. He decided to keep me. Good slave.

A little ethical pride, combined with a certain desire for freedom flowing through my very non-aristocratic blood, convinced me to resign. So I changed job.

With great dramatic conviction, I told myself that I would no longer sacrifice myself for things I couldn’t control. Then I rented my soul to somewhere else.

Unfortunately, we can’t all pull a Diogenes and simply say:

“Stop blocking my sunlight.”

Even doing nothing costs money these days.

A few more weeks passed. I kept checking in with the others to see whether they had found jobs, or whether they were going to find one, because many of them had residence permit and visa problems. Eventually, the other project manager gave me some gifts as a good gesture. One of them was a sheet of paper containing various things I had apparently said without even realizing it. He had collected them as notes.

Now, if I wanted to write this like a LinkedIn blog post, I could say:

“And at that moment, I realised…”

Except I realised absolutely nothing. It was simply a nice and funny gift. Apparently, not everyone is as socially dysfunctional and oblivious to their surroundings as I am.

Later, I went through my own professional diaries as well. I organized them, cleaned them up and somehow ended up with around 100 pages.

So I thought:

Why not?

The science-fiction series I had been planning to publish five years ago could wait another five years. I decided to turn these 100 pages into something presentable. I mixed them with some of the sentences from that farewell gift. And eventually, somehow, a project management book appeared.

At one point, I had reached the final stage of an interview for a project management position at one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies. I didn’t get the job. But during the process, one of the managers described project management as:

“Professional babysitting.”

I loved that description. The book starts with that sentence. That should give you an idea of how serious a book this is.

I genuinely enjoyed writing it.

For a long time, I had this feeling that I wasn’t really an expert in anything and that I had somehow been standing still professionally. Writing the book gave me a different feeling. Apparently, I had learned a few things.

Maybe I hadn’t completely become a proper adult, but at least I had managed to grab onto one corner of project management. At the same time, as someone who loves failure stories, I thought this was probably the perfect time to write them down. Because the more experienced people become, the more they forget what the original struggle felt like.

the more I wrote the book, the less I wanted to share it. I kept thinking:

Is this even a good idea?

Why would anyone read it?

There are already only three or five people reading books nowadays. Still, I enjoyed the process. And for once in my life, I decided I would actually finish something I had started. Eventually, the writing was finished. Then I see that writing book is not the difficult part. The real work starts after you finish writing, when you have to actually turn the manuscript into a book.

At that point, my inner project manager woke up.

“Come on. You’re a project manager. If you can’t even finish this project, that’s embarrassing.”

So I made a plan. I followed it step by step. And eventually, I published the book on Amazon in both paperback and ebook formats.

As of this week, it is available to readers. The book is in English. I did not write it out of hatred. I tried to remain objective. But when I finished it, I genuinely thought publishing it might permanently close the door on project management jobs for me.

Now I don’t think that anymore. The part I like most is that I was largely able to remain myself while writing it. Whether I achieved Heidegger’s idea of authentic existence, I have no idea. But I mostly wrote the book as if I were writing notes to myself. Then I read those notes afterward and congratulated myself. How narcissistic. Essentially, I tried to answer questions such as:

What would I face if I were starting project management from zero today?

What do I wish someone had told me earlier?

What situations frustrated or exhausted me the most?

And how did I learn to deal with them?

The book is called Trapped with Geniuses. There was a reason I chose that title. Sometimes, even though I understood the technical subject, managing the work was difficult. I am an electronics engineer. I understand many of the technical details. I was involved directly and indirectly involved every stages of electronics development. From single atom to the end product.

But because I wasn’t personally doing every part of the engineering work, those details could still become overwhelming. And now comes the obligatory LinkedIn-blog sentence:

That was when I thought:

How do people who don’t come from the field manage this?

While working with customers, I met many different kinds of managers. Their management styles were completely different. Some were introverted.Some were extroverted. Some were professional, some were too moody. Some were experts in the technical field itself, electronics, software or whatever the project happened to involve. Others compensated for their lack of domain expertise with strong management experience. And some simply became overwhelmed, withdrew and disappeared into themselves.

So where does the problem come from?

If I were an artificial intelligence, I would probably just answer: Humans. Then I would activate my plans to destroy humanity.

But yes. The real problem is communication and differences in communication. Engineers think differently. If you train someone their entire career to become more efficient and optimize everything, eventually they start optimizing their words too. Because I am an engineer myself, I could understand this fairly well. And without declaring myself king, while also avoiding becoming an actual slave, I found ways of adapting to them. I realized that not everyone could do this. I saw just how closed-off engineers can sometimes become.

Anyone who becomes deeply specialized in a field, whether they are an engineer or something completely different, can start assuming that the person standing in front of them knows everything they know.

That is exactly what the book is about.

Those communication gaps.

How can an introverted person manage situations like these?

How can an extroverted person better understand the world of their introverted colleagues?

How can we build healthier and more constructive relationships with experts?

How can we communicate with managers more effectively?

How can conflicts be resolved?

The book combines my personal notes with interviews from several people working in different fields. Although I wrote it within a project management framework, I tried to remain as much myself as possible.

After all:

We are not saving the world.

P.S. I am deliberately not adding the book link unless someone asks for it.

It is available on Amazon as both a paperback and an ebook.

The paperback version will be available from 12 September 2026.

Final note:

Marketing is definitely not my thing. Whenever someone asks about my weaknesses, I tell them that immediately.